European Union Researches the Benefits of Open Source Software

Editor's Note: Andy Oram reports on the possible implications of a recent study that explored the reasons behind the widespread use of, and support for, free and open source software.

A major research project under the name Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study, or FLOSS, recently explored reasons behind the widespread use of, and support for, free and open source software. This is, to my knowledge, the first large-scale, rigorous study concerning any aspect of free software. It involves interviews with thousands of developers and hundreds of businesses, with carefully-chosen questions and a correlation of results.

Equally significant is the funder of the study: the European
Union. These government representatives have displayed a
growing curiosity about, and sympathy for, the free software
phenomenon; see, for instance, the recent announcement
concerning
OpenEvidence,
a project in digital certificates and signatures. The EU is
an excellent body to sponsor a sympathetic but demanding
inquiry into the purposes and processes of free software
development. (The study was carried out for the EU by Berlecon Research GmbH and the University of Maastricht. The business survey involved only European participants, but the developer survey was worldwide.)

This article, like most of mine, will involve a modest portion of summary
accompanied by an ample serving of my own impressions and analysis.

Slow and Steady

The burning question many people bring to this survey -- whether friend or foe -- is: "Why would organizations choose to use free software?" We know
that the "free as in beer" aspect of free software appeals to underdeveloped
countries (see recent news items from Peru
and Venezuela,
along with China's Red Flag Linux). But
in more affluent Europe, price is not the issue. Over and over in the FLOSS
study, organizations place cost savings low on their list of reasons for
choosing free software. Ideological reasons will be discussed later in this
article. Overwhelmingly, the highest ranking reasons for using free software
center on quality:

Higher stability

Better access protection

Higher performance

Better functionality

Admittedly, "better price-to-performance ratio" turns up with a high rating.
But the survey notes that true cost comparisons are hard to make with any
confidence. Organizations also like the absence or low burden of license fees,
but I'm not sure that this is a cost issue. Organizations might simply want to
avoid the pain in the ass of predicting needs, negotiating with the vendor,
dealing with malfunctioning license servers, and so on.

Still, quality issues clearly trump cost issues in the FLOSS survey. This is
powerful ammunition for activists fighting the old misconception, still far too
prevalent, that free software is a poor man's consolation for the lack of funds
to buy really good software.

Looking deeper, I find another lesson in this confidence expressed by
businesses and nonprofits. The relatively slow pace of development in free
software is one of its strengths. Proprietary software companies have earned a
terrible reputation over many decades for shoveling in check-off boxes as fast
as marketing representatives can think them up. Bugs inevitably abound. Users complain
about bloatware and features that merely get in their way, as well as trying to
fix bugs by upgrading to the next feature release and getting more bugs.

Perhaps this is why MySQL is gaining market share, even though it started off
quite feature-poor; MySQL AB has taken its sweet time adding such basics as
transaction support and encrypted data transfers. What they offer is rock-solid
reliability (along with the performance that one achieves by leaving out
computationally-heavy functionality).

Security, which is now on administrators' minds more than ever, has always
been understood to be a function of stability and code quality. Modern Windows
systems have a number of security features -- ACLs and encrypted filesystems, for
example -- that Linux and the BSDs lack or require special patches for. But
security features are not what most users are looking for; they want
security, plain and simple. Linux and the BSDs offer that more reliably (unless
Bill Gates's recent conversion to the creed of high security is matched by
growing adherents throughout Microsoft).

We must also remember that new features do not change user behavior the
moment they're released; they take some time to percolate through the ground and
up the root systems of the user community. In particular, programmers are people,
too. They require time to learn about new features, recognize their benefits (if
any), and upgrade their applications. Each delay reduces the utility of a
feature upgrade.

Please understand that I believe in evolution. But the changes that make
people feel an urgent need to upgrade are those that radically reform their jobs
and their ways of interacting, such as graphical interfaces, the Web, and
cross-platform code development. These sorts of innovation can occur in both
free and proprietary software. In contrast, incremental change is not a big
selling point.

I have not yet discussed ease of use, a measure where free software
presumably doesn't come off so well -- at least for new and nonprofessional users.
The FLOSS study addressed this in a couple criteria, especially "Cost savings
regarding training and introduction of users," which predictably came out low as
a reason for using free software.

In general, free software has still not achieved the widespread familiarity
of Microsoft software. In a recent analysis
regarding the elusive "Total Cost of Ownership" (TCO) measure, the analysts noted the
familiarity of Microsoft software as one of its main advantages. More exposure
to free software can close the gap.

The FLOSS study itself throws up its hands when dealing with TCO. They report
that companies "were generally unable to provide even rough estimates about the
monetary value derived from using open source software," even concerning "simple
questions like license fee savings or hardware cost savings."